Category: quotes

We were born to be real, not to be perfect. The first time when you stumble upon quotes like that, and at first you are going to like oh that’s beautiful and a moment later you will get confused by those phrases. If you frequently spend an amount of your time on the internet, so you must have certainly come across dozens of blurry images with the elegant font on the top of it. It is almost impossible for you to stay away from those crappy phrases. Probably, you have seen your friends tossed those around on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, personal blogs, and you know its almost everywhere. Turns out, perhaps you find it irritating and your disdain can be justified by a recent study that finds out people who get obsessed with motivational quote are actually morons.

The study conducted by Gordon Pennycook and his Canadian scientist team at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada. They analyzed the internet phenomenon New Age Bullshit Generator. It is a website that randomly generates a bunch of nonsense quotes and Tumblr-square images in order to make the user sound like a guru. When Pennycook gave it a try for the first time, he found it deeply entertaining, but later on, he found it odds. Hence, Pennycook and the team conducted a study based on this phenomenon. They gathered for almost 800 participants and asked them to classify the quotes as nonsense, mundane, or profound in order to determine whether the phrase was actually bullshit.

Motivational Quotes are Bullshit

Pennycook study On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit which has been published, mentions the word bullshit at least for 200 times. Pennycook and the team found out that people who are overly open to crappy motivational quotes tend to be less intelligent than those who are not. The study also mentioned that those people tend to have strong beliefs, including religious beliefs, paranormal, and even conspiracy theories. Pennycook also stated that the people who have higher intelligence are able to detect that those illogical phrases are complete bullshit. The word bullshit in the Pennycook study is not in literal meaning.

Pennycook tried to explain it by using a profound quote hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty. He stated that even though this statement seems like trying to convey a deeper meaning, but this statement is a mere of buzzwords which compiled randomly into a sentence. He added that bullshit is not just nonsense, it something implies but it doesn’t have sufficient meaning.
Based on the overview above, it can be concluded that most of the motivational quotes are bullshit, but do you have any idea what profound is?